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hey guys!
this is my first time here, so dont be harsh if it's the wrong thread section or so, but I thought this might be the best place for my request. after following the scene here for quite a while, I thought it might be a good idea to become a part of it, because I'm just like you - I love starcraft! and thats why I need your help and I would really appreciate it if you could do so:
so I want to contribute something to the scene and the community who has been some kind of family for me for several years. that's why I would really love to work on a project which is related to starcraft and give something back.
first of all some facts about my study path: I'm studying 'cognitive media science' which is a mixture of psychology and computer science, though I want to concentrate on computer science in the future. this means I would like to build a software, an app or a web page for my bachelor thesis. anyhow, I could also do some research study regarding human-computer interaction or the influence of media aspects on the human, but it would be difficult to find a proper issue here I guess.
in conclusion, I miss some ideas what the software/app/webpage could be about. I have some approaches, but I'm not sure if it would really help. anyway I figured it would be the best to ask the community itself what they would want to have. here are some of my points:
1. something about statistics or ratings, but I'm afraid there are already too many of them (-> web page/app)
2. a live ticker, which provides the latest results in the major tournaments and leagues, maybe also offering a data base on past tournaments (-> app)
3. well sometimes I have the feeling that I lose the overview on teams, their players, and teamless players. so it might be useful to have something that shows you the actual rosters, who is on the open market, the players team history and maybe some speculations about where they will go and when the contract will end and what their price might be (-> web page)
4. I don't know if this is a good idea, because I'm no progamer, but I guess it's annoying to adjust your hotkeys, settings etc. so I figured it might be helpful to create a something, adapted to the esport games, where you can save your settings and look them up if you're on a LAN or somewhere else. (-> software/app/webpage)
5. On December 19 2012 08:19 LunaSea wrote:Show nested quote +On December 19 2012 08:14 yomi wrote:
those are all pretty good ideas
my biggest wish would be a site that lists build orders from major tournaments and keeps up to date on when they were used, their win rate, etc. this requires a lot of labor so you need users to keep it up to date. build-order pedia kind of thing.
I know liquipedia has this but people don't seem to update it or care or anything. software to make listing the build easier might help. Yeah I would be really interested in a site like this. A way of implementing this (to make it easier) would be to create only standard builds at the start and then anyone can create subbranches to this build that correspond to variations that pro players played in certain tournaments. For example, imagine you take 1-1-1 as a standard build and you have Puma play a version of this build where he does something different after 15 SCVs then, you could visualize the 1-1-1 build and then the Puma subbranch after 15 workers. Just my 2 cents. ^^
that's what I thought about so far. as I said earlier, I would really appreciate it if you could help me here and elaborate on the mentioned ideas, or even come up with your own ones.
if this thread is sh.. and dumb, then I'm sorry :D
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Ok so i'm not sure that those ideas are part of the categories you wanted to work on but here I go :
1) Create a better rating system than TLPD
- TLPD is great but has some known flaws or at least silly behaviors in it which creates strange results now and then. One of them would be that tournaments aren't weighted which means that sometimes if there is a Korean player that dominates the Korean weeklies, he will be ranked very high albeit not having to play top players necessarily.
I'm not event sure that the rating of a player goes down with inactivity.
You could add some other parameters or weight tournaments differently based on the current match-up balance, korean tournament vs international tournament, traveling / not traveling ...etc.
2) I would discourage you of doing the second one because there is nothing technical about it, no challenge. The most important thing for apps like this is the number of volunteers reporting information to the site and Liquipedia does this very well already.
Although if you are really attached to this idea, you could help Liquipedia create an app that would scrape data from their site or something like this.
3) This idea is not bad but again there is already a place that does this, Liquipedia for the team rosters and a thread on TeamLiquid that creates a list of all the current free agents in the scene (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=378957).
4) This could be a good idea. You could create a software that imports / exports SC2Hotkey files. There was somebody on TL that was trying to develop the "optimal hotkey layout" and he had files that you only had to copy paste to install. (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=341878)
I'm not sure though that this would be worthy of a bachelor thesis but you're the judge.
Another idea which would go well with the psychology factor is that you could analyze the results of certain players and look how certain factors affect them.
Those factors could be traveling, history against that opponent, metagame, place in the tournament (finals / group-play), ...etc.
I hope this helped.
Edit: I added the links.
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those are all pretty good ideas
my biggest wish would be a site that lists build orders from major tournaments and keeps up to date on when they were used, their win rate, etc. this requires a lot of labor so you need users to keep it up to date. build-order pedia kind of thing.
I know liquipedia has this but people don't seem to update it or care or anything. software to make listing the build easier might help.
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On December 19 2012 08:14 yomi wrote:
those are all pretty good ideas
my biggest wish would be a site that lists build orders from major tournaments and keeps up to date on when they were used, their win rate, etc. this requires a lot of labor so you need users to keep it up to date. build-order pedia kind of thing.
I know liquipedia has this but people don't seem to update it or care or anything. software to make listing the build easier might help.
Yeah I would be really interested in a site like this.
A way of implementing this (to make it easier) would be to create only standard builds at the start and then anyone can create subbranches to this build that correspond to variations that pro players played in certain tournaments.
For example, imagine you take 1-1-1 as a standard build and you have Puma play a version of this build where he does something different after 15 SCVs then, you could visualize the 1-1-1 build and then the Puma subbranch after 15 workers.
Just my 2 cents. ^^
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On December 19 2012 08:13 LunaSea wrote:
Ok so i'm not sure that those ideas are part of the categories you wanted to work on but here I go :
1) Create a better rating system than TLPD
- TLPD is great but has some known flaws or at least silly behaviors in it which creates strange results now and then. One of them would be that tournaments aren't weighted which means that sometimes if there is a Korean player that dominates the Korean weeklies, he will be ranked very high albeit not having to player top players necessarily.
I'm not event sure that the rating of a player goes down with inactivity.
You could add some other parameters or weight tournaments differently based on the current match-up balance, korean tournament vs international tournament, traveling / not traveling ...etc.
I hope this helped.
http://aligulac.com/
Something like this? 
I think doing a bachelors thesis on a video game is/can be a risky business. I myself would never attempt it (writing mine from february to may in 2013)
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On December 19 2012 08:21 Grovbolle wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On December 19 2012 08:13 LunaSea wrote:
Ok so i'm not sure that those ideas are part of the categories you wanted to work on but here I go :
1) Create a better rating system than TLPD
- TLPD is great but has some known flaws or at least silly behaviors in it which creates strange results now and then. One of them would be that tournaments aren't weighted which means that sometimes if there is a Korean player that dominates the Korean weeklies, he will be ranked very high albeit not having to player top players necessarily.
I'm not event sure that the rating of a player goes down with inactivity.
You could add some other parameters or weight tournaments differently based on the current match-up balance, korean tournament vs international tournament, traveling / not traveling ...etc.
I hope this helped. Something like this? I think doing a bachelors thesis on a video game is/can be a risky business. I myself would never attempt it (writing mine from february to may in 2013)
yeah for example. =D
Edit; I looked a little bit at that site you linked and there are some strange stats. On this page http://aligulac.com/records/ MarineKing appears twice in the same category.
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You have plenty of time to write up systems like this which are damn fun. In fact, loads of it. However your bachelor's thesis (a dissertation in the UK) is basically what you spent your time in university doing. So unless you have something really applicable and concrete for your future employment (not just some wishy washy crap about esports) then find something else.
Ultimately Starcraft 2 is likely going to be a bubble that lasts give or take about as long as it takes for Blizzard to replace it - I'm going to say around 5 years or so. Are you really happy having your entire future prospects being reliant on you justifying why you chose to write the most important academic document of your life to date based on a video game?
Just a warning.
By the way, I would note that the behaviour of game players is a genuine academic field worthy of a hell of a lot of interesting study - especially since it branches out into all kinds of both mathematical and psychological analysis. I'm not writing off research based on video games, but what I am saying is make sure you have something scientifically or computationally concrete, rather than trying to fill a gap in this community.
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On December 19 2012 08:21 Grovbolle wrote:Show nested quote +On December 19 2012 08:13 LunaSea wrote:
Ok so i'm not sure that those ideas are part of the categories you wanted to work on but here I go :
1) Create a better rating system than TLPD
- TLPD is great but has some known flaws or at least silly behaviors in it which creates strange results now and then. One of them would be that tournaments aren't weighted which means that sometimes if there is a Korean player that dominates the Korean weeklies, he will be ranked very high albeit not having to player top players necessarily.
I'm not event sure that the rating of a player goes down with inactivity.
You could add some other parameters or weight tournaments differently based on the current match-up balance, korean tournament vs international tournament, traveling / not traveling ...etc.
I hope this helped. http://aligulac.com/Something like this? I think doing a bachelors thesis on a video game is/can be a risky business. I myself would never attempt it (writing mine from february to may in 2013)
The course of study seems to work with it a bit, but the problem is engaging a reader who may not give a shit about video games.
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On December 19 2012 08:27 Evangelist wrote:
You have plenty of time to write up systems like this which are damn fun. In fact, loads of it. However your bachelor's thesis (a dissertation in the UK) is basically what you spent your time in university doing. So unless you have something really applicable and concrete for your future employment (not just some wishy washy crap about esports) then find something else.
Ultimately Starcraft 2 is likely going to be a bubble that lasts give or take about as long as it takes for Blizzard to replace it - I'm going to say around 5 years or so. Are you really happy having your entire future prospects being reliant on you justifying why you chose to write the most important academic document of your life to date based on a video game?
Just a warning.
By the way, I would note that the behaviour of game players is a genuine academic field worthy of a hell of a lot of interesting study - especially since it branches out into all kinds of both mathematical and psychological analysis. I'm not writing off research based on video games, but what I am saying is make sure you have something scientifically or computationally concrete, rather than trying to fill a gap in this community.
Although this is true, the benefits of your bachelor thesis will probably help you in your first 5 years in an industry after that, experience is prevalent. Starcraft will probably exist for at least 5 more years.
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On December 19 2012 08:27 Evangelist wrote:
You have plenty of time to write up systems like this which are damn fun. In fact, loads of it. However your bachelor's thesis (a dissertation in the UK) is basically what you spent your time in university doing. So unless you have something really applicable and concrete for your future employment (not just some wishy washy crap about esports) then find something else.
Ultimately Starcraft 2 is likely going to be a bubble that lasts give or take about as long as it takes for Blizzard to replace it - I'm going to say around 5 years or so. Are you really happy having your entire future prospects being reliant on you justifying why you chose to write the most important academic document of your life to date based on a video game?
Just a warning.
By the way, I would note that the behaviour of game players is a genuine academic field worthy of a hell of a lot of interesting study - especially since it branches out into all kinds of both mathematical and psychological analysis. I'm not writing off research based on video games, but what I am saying is make sure you have something scientifically or computationally concrete, rather than trying to fill a gap in this community.
Games or eSports in general may be a better theme to start with. However, our OP does need to create an app. which in itself can be challenging without a concrete starting point. Perhaps going about this in a different order is the best way. Focus on thesis, and let the app just happen. Making some convoluted, statistical or predictive app. for some game may indeed not be the greatest of ideas, especially if having to write a thesis on why it matters is step 2.
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Those are all pretty limited for a bachelor's thesis, at least by NA standards. You're at school to learn... why do a project that anyone with a little programming experience under their belt could do? The best thing to do would be to talk to your thesis advisor about what kinds of projects would be advisable. There are a number of psychology research groups that incorporate starcraft into their research, and since your area of study includes some psychology, you could probably find an appropriate study topic there.
If you want to stick with something purely functional, then I like LunaSea's idea. In the chess world they have these websites where they use a huge database of games to determine the winning probability for each move, given the current state of the board. It seems like this has really changed how people learn and play chess. Seeing if you can come up with something similar for SC2 would be pretty fun. Something that would be very useful, but probably difficult to do, would be software that can compare your replay to a given build order, and tell you where you screwed up.
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On December 19 2012 08:38 munchmunch wrote:
Those are all pretty limited for a bachelor's thesis, at least by NA standards. You're at school to learn... why do a project that anyone with a little programming experience under their belt could do? The best thing to do would be to talk to your thesis advisor about what kinds of projects would be advisable. There are a number of psychology research groups that incorporate starcraft into their research, and since your area of study includes some psychology, you could probably find an appropriate study topic there.
If you want to stick with something purely functional, then I like LunaSea's idea. In the chess world they have these websites where they use a huge database of games to determine the winning probability for each move, given the current state of the board. It seems like this has really changed how people learn and play chess. Seeing if you can come up with something similar for SC2 would be pretty fun. Something that would be very useful, but probably difficult to do, would be software that can compare your replay to a given build order, and tell you where you screwed up.
Exactly.
If you don't have the time / skills to write a big software project, you could write an add-on for SC2Gears that does analysis like this.
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please make a starcraft 2 platformer game.
alternatively, please rebalance starcraft, solve all existing gripes with the game (clumping, hard counters, build order monotony, etc.)
and release a free LAN enabled version of this game to the public at large. Document the results in a video documentary that includes voice over narration from Werner Herzog.
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first of all, thank you for your responses!
in generel, I'm aware that writing about a topic like esport is not very welcome and it might be risky. but I would love to work in the esports scene later on, so why not starting with the bachelor thesis? I also want to contine doing a master afterwards, therefore it might not be that curcial 
I already talked to some advisors, my favorite issue is to edit an already existent app, that's why I thought why not create an own one with a theme I really love and would be happy to work on it! this is also just a try, I have to convince the advisors on the professorship first, but at least I want to give it a try!
it also might not be the hardest challenge to program those mentioned ideas, anyhow my course of studies only gives an introduction on programming as it is no computer science only course.
On December 19 2012 08:19 LunaSea wrote:Show nested quote +On December 19 2012 08:14 yomi wrote:
those are all pretty good ideas
my biggest wish would be a site that lists build orders from major tournaments and keeps up to date on when they were used, their win rate, etc. this requires a lot of labor so you need users to keep it up to date. build-order pedia kind of thing.
I know liquipedia has this but people don't seem to update it or care or anything. software to make listing the build easier might help. Yeah I would be really interested in a site like this. A way of implementing this (to make it easier) would be to create only standard builds at the start and then anyone can create subbranches to this build that correspond to variations that pro players played in certain tournaments. For example, imagine you take 1-1-1 as a standard build and you have Puma play a version of this build where he does something different after 15 SCVs then, you could visualize the 1-1-1 build and then the Puma subbranch after 15 workers. Just my 2 cents. ^^
that's an interesting idea! at a first glance this seems to need a lot of effort! but I will edit it in the OP! thanks
On December 19 2012 08:13 LunaSea wrote:
Ok so i'm not sure that those ideas are part of the categories you wanted to work on but here I go :
1) Create a better rating system than TLPD
- TLPD is great but has some known flaws or at least silly behaviors in it which creates strange results now and then. One of them would be that tournaments aren't weighted which means that sometimes if there is a Korean player that dominates the Korean weeklies, he will be ranked very high albeit not having to play top players necessarily.
I'm not event sure that the rating of a player goes down with inactivity.
You could add some other parameters or weight tournaments differently based on the current match-up balance, korean tournament vs international tournament, traveling / not traveling ...etc.
2) I would discourage you of doing the second one because there is nothing technical about it, no challenge. The most important thing for apps like this is the number of volunteers reporting information to the site and Liquipedia does this very well already.
Although if you are really attached to this idea, you could help Liquipedia create an app that would scrape data from their site or something like this.
3) This idea is not bad but again there is already a place that does this, Liquipedia for the team rosters and a thread on TeamLiquid that creates a list of all the current free agents in the scene (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=378957).
4) This could be a good idea. You could create a software that imports / exports SC2Hotkey files. There was somebody on TL that was trying to develop the "optimal hotkey layout" and he had files that you only had to copy paste to install. (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=341878)
I'm not sure though that this would be worthy of a bachelor thesis but you're the judge.
Another idea which would go well with the psychology factor is that you could analyze the results of certain players and look how certain factors affect them.
Those factors could be traveling, history against that opponent, metagame, place in the tournament (finals / group-play), ...etc.
I hope this helped.
Edit: I added the links.
1)
yeah that bugs me all the time, too. I would like to create some algorithm to satisfy the majority of the community, however there are already a plenty of statistic sides, therefore I wasn't sure if it would be a good idea.
2)
that's my concern, too. the main problem are the points of intersection, but liquipedia is always on point with results, so this might be sufficient
3)
I thought of it more like of a player exchange platform, but I'm not sure!
4)
I also wanted to go further, like hardware settings etc.! thanks for the reference!
in any case you encouraged me to talk to the psychology advisors, maybe I might find some interest in this topic! I will keep you updated!
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Assuming you are capable of elucidating on the effects of computer interaction on humans, i would like to see a study concerning the age at which individuals are introduced and exposed to computers and social media. How do different age groups acclimate to the interfaces and uses of computers? What are the long and short term effects on the people themselves? Do different ages experience different developmental paths? If so, what are the ideal or more beneficial developmental paths to follow?
If Starcraft is a microcosm of the larger internet/computer world, then there might be something there for you to discover and share.
Not sure what kind of app you could design to assist in the research of this, but that's the best i've got
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EPT
